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Reading List

What I'm reading.

A working list — books, papers, and long essays that shaped The Great Healthcare Disruption and the forthcoming book on epigenetic clocks. I'll keep adding as I finish things worth recommending.

On American healthcare

  • An American Sickness — Elisabeth Rosenthal. The clearest reporting on how cost got embedded into US care. Pairs cleanly with the policy chapters of Disruption.
  • Deep Medicine — Eric Topol. The case for AI restoring the physician-patient relationship rather than replacing it. (Topol blurbed The Great Healthcare Disruption; the books are in conversation.)
  • The Innovator's Prescription — Clayton Christensen, Jerome Grossman, Jason Hwang. Disruption theory applied to medicine; older but the framework holds.
  • The Price We Pay — Marty Makary. On price transparency and what happens when it arrives.

On longevity and aging

  • Lifespan — David Sinclair. The information theory of aging; the source for a lot of the popular conversation. Read with judgment.
  • Outlive — Peter Attia. Useful framing of healthspan as the goal, with practical chapters that hold up.
  • Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To — Sinclair (popular treatment). Pair with Lopez-Otin et al.'s "Hallmarks of Aging" review (Cell, 2013, updated 2023) for the rigorous scaffolding.
  • Hallmarks of Aging (review article, Lopez-Otin, Blasco, Partridge, Serrano, Kroemer; Cell, 2013) — The taxonomy that organizes the field.

On AI in medicine

  • The Coming Wave — Mustafa Suleyman. Frame for thinking about AI deployment risks; not a medicine book, but the frame applies.
  • Algorithms of Oppression — Safiya Umoja Noble. On bias in deployed systems. Essential before getting excited about clinical AI.
  • Weapons of Math Destruction — Cathy O'Neil. Same.

On leading institutions

  • The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz. Operating-during-crisis lessons that translate from tech to academic medicine more than they should.
  • High Output Management — Andy Grove. Old, still right. The reading list every CEO of a complex organization gives their team eventually.
  • Team of Teams — Stanley McChrystal. On how to run organizations when the environment changes faster than the org chart.

Fiction worth knowing

  • The Andromeda Strain, Coma — Michael Crichton, Robin Cook. The model for medical thrillers that take the medicine seriously. The lineage Coded to Kill is in.
  • Cutting for Stone — Abraham Verghese. The case that fiction can teach what a clinical anthropology can't.

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